offshore wind

How do different aspects of the input metocean data affect Mermaid results?

There are a range of sources of variability when it comes to putting together a Mermaid analysis, and they can all affect the output statistics to various degrees. It could be subtle changes such as weather thresholds, task durations or the level of suspendability; or more strategic changes such as vessel and port choice. But that’s what Mermaid is designed for, for you to be able to tweak and optimise your operation to minimise the weather risk. Read more >

James Fisher Marine Services secures order from one of Europe’s leading energy companies, Vattenfall, for Mermaid®

Vattenfall will utilise Mermaid® for the strategic planning of its offshore wind farm operations

Mermaid® is a sophisticated marine project optimisation and weather risk mitigation system set to enable huge operational cost-savings

James Fisher Marine Services, part of James Fisher and Sons plc, is proud to announce that Vattenfall, one of Europe’s leading -wind park operators, has ordered a full Mermaid® system license for the strategic planning of its offshore wind farm operations. Read more >

In this post we’re going to look at bringing the foundations to the installation vessel at site. It’s thought that, as with carrying more components, we can increase the working time by transiting less. If another vessel (a barge and tugs) brings components to the main vessel the transit requirements are reduced, although it’s worth noting that offshore transfers of this type are quite strictly limited; the trade-off between transit reduction and sensitive operations is the main concern here.

The Simulation

Our base case simulation includes the transfer of installation components to the installation vessel from a storage barge in the port. Read more >

In the last post in this series we identified that even with a larger carrying capacity, our work force was still unable to fully exploit the preferable summer weather and that all start options performed at least some work during the winter. In this post we’re looking at splitting our installation process into two halves.

The Simulation

To see if we can gain a performance improvement by better exploiting the summer season we are going to install the foundations in two batches of 36. Read more >

Continuing the series of posts on the analysis of offshore wind turbine installation methods, this post looks at the improvements, if any, which can be gained by increasing the carrying capacity of the installation vessel. It is thought that time spent transiting between the vessels home port and the wind farm could be better spent on performing the installation operations, particularly in the summer months when favourable weather occurs. To do this we’re looking at increasing the on station time by allowing the vessel to carry more monopiles and transition pieces. Read more >

We’re looking at ways in which we can install the foundations for a North Sea offshore wind farm and using Mermaid to make decisions on the vessels and the strategy which best suit our needs. In the previous post in this series we discussed the base case for this analysis process, this being our first look at how we might perform the work.

In this post we’re going to take a look at the results of the analysis we ran last time and we’ll try to work out how, and indeed if, we can improve things. Read more >

This is the first in a series of posts looking at how we can use Mermaid to:

Analyse a large offshore operation;

Make decisions about which vessels and strategies we want to use;

Optimise our offshore operation.

We’re going to perform a series of simulations to help determine what vessel and strategy we should use and when we should perform the work. This is a fictitious case so we’ll throw a few constraints and assumptions in as we go just to make it interesting. Read more >